Alone

Yes, that’s me, drinking alone at a bar. Still in work clothes, twenty-year-old paperback being read between sips of pale ale. practically, I am here to have a meal from the food van outside and to listen to the blues music I failed to get anyone else interested in. While I’m enjoying the beer, the food and the music, the real reason I am here is that if I wasn’t, I would have bought some depressing take away on my way home from work, and stared at a computer screen until I summoned the energy to shower and go to bed, all entirely alone, instead of alone in a crowd.

Here the barmaid who flirted with me last time is absent, but I did have a conversation with the bar manager about Vietnam. Apart from a quick chat with the one-man band on my way out about my novel, and half a dozen nods with regulars, that’s the limit of my social interaction. But it still beats home.

It’s strange that I do this all the time when I travel, but it seldom occurs to just show up at a bar alone and eat and drink in my own city.